Monitor | Why seven always beats nine (even without an official cat)

Over the past six months, the South China Morning Post has repeatedly suggested that the line-up of the Chinese Communist Party's all-powerful Politburo standing committee will be cut from nine members to just seven at next month's party congress.

Writing in the paper on Monday, Australian-based academics Kerry Brown and David Goodman argued that such a reduction in numbers would be "a backward step".

"The complexity of governing contemporary China, and the huge burdens taken on by an already greatly overstretched elite, would give reason for an increase in the size of the standing committee, not its reduction," they argued, adding that a cut in numbers would be a "victory of short-term power politics over longer-term thinking about solutions for the sustainable deployment of power in China".

I'm not sure about that. While Brown and Goodman are certainly right that a reduction in standing committee numbers would be a step back, it is far from clear that it would be a bad thing for the effectiveness of the Communist Party's decision-making.

To see why, we need only refer to the definitive work on committee membership numbers, Cyril Parkinson's 1958 essay Directors and Councils or the Coefficient of Inefficiency.

In this miniature masterpiece, Parkinson, a professor at the University of Singapore, argued convincingly that the decision-making ability of any governing committee is inversely proportional to its size.